Prior to its currently subservient position to civilian politics, the Turkish military had always had an autonomous position with a strong ideological commitment to safeguard secularism. From the 1980s to the end of the 2000s, the Turkish military played a key role in the construction of political Islam as a form of risk and in the securitization of religion both in the public sphere and within its own structure. This article examines the Turkish military’s security discourse around religion and the Islamic headscarf through the experiences of women in military families, and is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2011. Looking at headscarf regulations and the everyday life on military bases, it explores how the military governed Islamism as a form of risk in culturally and sexually specific ways. Drawing on critical security studies that approach risk as a form of social governance, the article examines secular risk governance through the lived experiences of women in military families, the regulation of their daily conduct, and the representation of their bodies and sexual identities through dress. Concluding remarks examine the significance of secular risk governance in the post-2010 era.
While research on geographies of creativity have proliferated in the last few years, there has been scant attention to religious cultural and artistic practices, particularly in the context of the Middle East. This research seeks to address such gap with a focus on the Islamic and traditional visual arts scene which has flourished in Istanbul in the past decade and a half along with the rise of political Islam in Turkey. Rendered obsolete through the Western-oriented and secular cultural politics since the early republican era, art forms such as Arabic calligraphy ( hat), miniature ( minyatür), and illumination ( tezhip) have now found currency as ‘authentically Turkish and Islamic’ in an art scene that emerged alongside Islamist politics. This paper examines the trajectory of Islamic and traditional visual arts through the lens of cultural and creative industries starting from the cultural politics of Islamic urban governance through the 1990s and 2000s, and to the emergence of an Islamist-nationalist authoritarianism in the past decade. In doing so, it aims to situate Islamic and traditional visual arts on the map in studies on geographies of creativity, particularly in the Middle Eastern and Islamic context, where limited attention has been paid to cultural and artistic practices. With ethnographic reflections from the field, it highlights the internal dynamics of an art scene and the potential it bears in unsettling the core concepts of Turkish Islamic nationalism from within.
Some recent studies suggest narrowly defined economic growth is the key to reducing the infant mortality rate. A host of new studies emerged in reaction to this assertion. These new studies emphasize the role of increased health expenditures in reducing infant mortality rates. Analyzing the infant mortality rate using cross-sectional data for provinces in Turkey, this paper first ranks provinces by their level of socioeconomic development, and then tests both linear and nonlinear regression models to explore the relationship between the infant mortality rate and the indicators of socioeconomic development. This paper contributes to the infant mortality literature by providing additional insights into the determinants of infant mortality using consistently measured cross-sectional data for the provinces within a developing country. Our findings indicate that per capita gross domestic product is a significant determinant of the infant mortality rate, but the relationship is not a linear one.
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